Of Lament and Longing

 

Thursday, June 24, 2021

From the depths of despair, O Lord, I call for your help.  Hear my cry, O Lord.  Pay attention to my prayer.  Lord, if you kept a record of our sins, who, O Lord, could ever survive?  But you offer forgiveness, that we might learn to fear you.  I am counting on the Lord; yes, I am counting on him.  I have put my hope in his word.  I long for the Lord more than sentries long for the dawn, yes, more than sentries long for the dawn.  O Israel, hope in the Lord; for with the Lord there is unfailing love.  His redemption overflows.  He himself will redeem Israel from every kind of sin.  Psalm 130

It is a well-known fact that we come into this world crying-out in objection to the change of a comfortable womb to the rude awakening of a birth canal and a smack on the backside.  A book I’m savoring at the moment has this in the first chapter:  Every human being has the same opening story.  Life begins with tears.  It’s simply a part of what it means to be human – to cry is human.[1] 

The Psalmist writes to all the Jewish pilgrims of the land as they head to Jerusalem to worship.  He records the deep lament of his own heart as an encouragement to those who come after him to follow his example of crying-out.  But this crying-out is not just wailing in pain; rather it is pain with purpose.  The purpose draws our longing into looking…for God.  The pure fact at the base of our being is that we long for God, and it compels us to search for Him.  

As the ancient church father Augustine has it, we are born with a God-sized hole in our heart (inner being), and cannot be at rest until that void is filled.

The Psalmist takes us deeper than Augustine’s hole-in-the-heart; he shows us the pathway that leads to what to do about that longing – how to open the heart by placing our hope in the Lord even before we understand Him.  The Psalmist proclaims the forgiveness of the Lord for our sins.  This is the hole-in-the-heart problem that every human understands innately, without any prompting from parents, religion, or the culture into which we’re born.  We KNOW we’re sinners because we feel the hole separating us from every part of our Creator, in whose image we were made.  And we KNOW something must be done about that, otherwise the possibilities are only two – we die in shame, or go insane. 

But, if we are to address the problem, God gives us faith that redemption from our sin comes from the unfailing love and mercy of God…Who forgives.  To place our hope and trust in God’s covenant love is the Psalmist’s solution.

If you look for any other solution you will come up dry.  Lament is different than being a victim, or (on the other end of the spectrum) an arrogant mover and shaker victimizer of others, or anything else in-between or different.  Rather, lament is facing the fact that the hole does exist, and it is yours, chosen when you decided to take your will above anything God said. 

God will forgive that, but only when we fully place our hope in Him, and cry-out to Him in faith for that forgiveness.

For You Today

For those who will not lament over the hole-in-the-heart which separates them from God, there is no hope.  But for those who will lament, and seek, and knock, and ask…the door of mercy will swing wide-open.  And, inside God’s place, beyond the door of mercy, there is a mansion of joy!

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day!   

[1] Title Image: Pixabay.com   Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation^©

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[1] Mark Vroegop, Dark Clouds Deep Mercy (2019, Crossway, Wheaton, Illinois), 25

Looking for a Place to Hide

 

Monday, August 17, 2020

From the depths of despair, O Lord, I call for your help.  Hear my cry, O Lord.  Pay attention to my prayer.  Lord, if you kept a record of our sins, who, O Lord, could ever survive?  But you offer forgiveness, that we might learn to fear you.  I am counting on the Lord; yes, I am counting on him.  I have put my hope in his word.  I long for the Lord more than sentries long for the dawn, yes, more than sentries long for the dawn.  O Israel, hope in the Lord; for with the Lord there is unfailing love.  His redemption overflows.  He himself will redeem Israel from every kind of sin.  Psalm 130:1-8

I can recall with vivid accuracy that anxiety, being on-edge, and the feeling of nervous forebode in the pit of my stomach; the preacher was talking about that book – the one where God records all our sins.  And he went on and on about it, picking at every-last-thing I’d ever done wrong.  And then he said if I wanted to make it into the other book, that one where the saved people have their names written, I’d better change – it was time to decide. 

That preacher hardly knew me, but, then again, he did.  He was speaking about the universal condition of human fallenness.  Every person has a sin nature, and we succumb to temptation in one way or another.  My sins may not have been the same as yours, but they are mine, nonetheless.  And that preacher knew it!  And I was definitely looking for a place to hide!

And then, along comes Solomon to back up the preacher’s argument, and then, blow it up in the next breath.  Solomon points to the most devastating (and annoying) truth in human existence – God keeps a record of our sins.

Lord, if you kept a record of our sins, who, O Lord, could ever survive?  Psalm 130:3

I don’t know how God could be God unless he was aware of everything.  My sins are not hidden from Him…and neither are yours.  Something deep within each of us tells us there is nothing we can truly bury so deep as to hide it from God.

But I also mentioned that in Solomon’s next stroke of the pen he blew up the whole judgment thing:

But you offer forgiveness, that we might learn to fear you.  Psalm 130:4

In just two sentences that take just 8 seconds to read aloud Solomon, the wisest man to ever draw breath covers the most important reality in the universe:  We have all sinned and are guilty before God…and God has already decided to forgive us.

That other book…the one where the saved people have their names written…your name is already in that book.  According to the Book of Revelation names are written in the Book of Life, and only erased if there is no forgiveness for sins.  But, for those who trust in the victory of Jesus Christ, whose death on the cross was for our forgiveness, those names are not erased, but proclaimed innocent in heaven!

All who are victorious will be clothed in white. I will never erase their names from the Book of Life, but I will announce before my Father and his angels that they are mine.  Revelation 3:5

So, the good news in that uncomfortable truth the preacher was laying on my 10-year-old self, about how if I wanted to escape the flames of hell and get my name in Jesus’ book…he was right about my guilt, but he should’ve told me my name was already in Jesus’ book, written in blood. 

For You Today

God knew each of us before we were formed in our mothers’ wombs.  He had written our name in His eternal book.  And with each entry the mind and heart of God uttered that familiar word we see in Scripture, Come! 

For you and me that is the sweetest word our souls could ever hear.  It means we don’t have to look for a place to hide, now, or ever.

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road today.  Have a blessed day!

VIDEO

Title image Pixabay.com ∞  Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation©

For other posts on Psalm 130 see Night Waiting and What the Angel Said

Night Waiting

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Friday, August 10, 2018

From the depths of despair, O Lord, I call for your help.  Hear my cry, O Lord.  Pay attention to my prayer.  Lord, if you kept a record of our sins, who, O Lord, could ever survive?  But you offer forgiveness, that we might learn to fear you.  I am counting on the Lord; yes, I am counting on him.  I have put my hope in his word.  I long for the Lord more than sentries long for the dawn, yes, more than sentries long for the dawn.  O Israel, hope in the Lord; for with the Lord there is unfailing love.  His redemption overflows.  He himself will redeem Israel from every kind of sin.  Psalm 130:1-8^(NLT)

It’s hard to forget the angst of waiting for the dawn when you’re on sentry.  There is always something so unfriendly about the darkness.  It is no wonder Scripture uses darkness as a descriptive for sinful activity; it’s something that has inherent destruction about it, and always leads to no-good.

My unit in Vietnam did not have overwhelming casualties; we were in more secure areas than some.  However, we still had to be on guard.  When my turn came around to pull guard duty through the night it seemed they were the longest nights of the century.  We were posted by twos to the guard stations, and, although we became sleepy, the threat of an enemy sneaking into the camp was more than enough to keep us alert…and on edge!

During one moonless night shift it was so still and dark, even the sound of an ant breathing could disturb the silence.  Suddenly a firefight broke out in the valley below us.  It was truly unnerving to see the flashes of rifles and feel the thunderous concussion of grenades and mortars exploding, and the helicopter gunships above raining-down streaks of machine-gun fire.  In 20 minutes, that seemed three-weeks long, it was over, and you could see and smell the traces of leftover smoke from the explosions, floating, slowly fading to dark and quiet.  The memory of death, altogether dark and quiet; this is the fearful waiting of the night.

The Psalmist was hoping desperately for the dawn.  He compared his waiting to the angst of the military sentries longing for dawn.  But the kind of dawn he was longing to see wasn’t of physical threats of darkness and death; the writer of this Psalm was agonizing through the long night of darkness in the soul of his nation.  This was a spiritual void, a place of godlessness that created an unlit void in the God-shaped place we humans call our hearts.  When we walk in sin, we give power to the darkness to overwhelm and take us prisoner.

But the prophets pointed to the dawn:

Who among you fears the Lord and obeys his servant?  If you are walking in darkness, without a ray of light, trust in the Lord and rely on your God.  Isaiah 50:10^(NLT)

For You Today

The most unique departure from the constraints of nature and the physical absence of light, compared to spiritual darkness, is a matter of control.  In the physical realm, humans have no control over when the sun comes up…that’s God’s work. 

But we have the Lord God in which to trust, Who removes our spiritually-blind ways…and the switch of faith is always within reach – and entirely our choice.

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day. 

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[1] Title Image:  Courtesy of Pixabay.com